White Columns is proud to present “Male” an exhibition of portrait
works drawn from the personal collection of curator, writer and The New
Yorker photography critic Vince Aletti. Eschewing any hierarchical
distinctions, and featuring more than 100 photographs, drawings,
sculptures, and paintings, the exhibition juxtaposes works by
celebrated figures with works by emerging artists, alongside
anonymously authored images and flea market finds.

As art historian Richard Brilliant has asserted – in his 1991 study
Portraiture - portraits embody a “representation of the structuring of
human relationships,” a scenario which the San Francisco-based writer
Kevin Killian has defined as a “social contract.” Exploring these
entanglements, and united by subject – each work in Aletti’s collection
depicts images of men, either individually or in groups – “Male”
presents a complex history of portraiture, and the acts of depiction
and representation. Aletti’s eclectic approach to collecting, which
conflates both historical and vernacular material, reveals a highly
idiosyncratic and fiercely independent articulation of visual culture.

Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker's
Goings on About Town section and writes a regular column about photo
books for Photograph. He contributes occasional features and reviews to
Aperture, Art + Auction, Art & Antiques, and Photoworks. He was the
art editor of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005, and the paper's
photo critic for 20 years. He is the winner of the International Center
of Photography's 2005 Infinity Award in writing. Aletti wrote half of
the 101 brief descriptive essays that form the backbone of Andrew
Roth's “The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the
Twentieth Century” (2001) and has written introductions to books by
Michael Thompson and Ingar Krauss (both 2005) and Marc Cohen and Kohei
Yoshiyuki (both 2007). In March of 2002, he co-curated a show of Steven
Klein's fashion photography for the Musee de L'Elysee in Lausanne,
Switzerland. He worked as a consultant and key contributor to an
exhibition about the rise and fall of disco that opened in November
2002 at Seattle's Experience Music Project. “Flesh Tones: 100 Years of
the Nude,” a show of photographs he organized, was at New York’s Robert
Mann Gallery in 2003, and he was the curator of a show of work by the
art director and photographer Henry Wolf at the Howard Greenberg
Gallery in 2005. Aletti is currently working with Andrew Roth on
“Male,” a book of photographs from his collection.

Parallel to the exhibition “Male” White Columns will publish a
compilation of Aletti’s 1970s column on disco music (‘Disco File’ -
originally published on a weekly basis in Record World magazine.) For
further information about this publication, please contact the gallery.